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Clarity on product building, business strategy, and activating your network (if you’re anti-networking) w/ Adam Oliner
In this episode, we explore the story of Adam Oliner, CEO & Founder @ Graft and discuss his perspectives on building business models, considerations around early business strategy, best practices for activating your network (if you’re anti-networking), and lessons from their recent pre-seed round & product-building bias toward ease of use! Plus, we dive into what it's like to be a founder with young kids, the impact of family on day-to-day operations and company values!
ABOUT ADAM OLINERAdam is the CEO & Founder at Graft, which aims to make the AI of the 1% accessible to the 99%. Before that, he led machine learning teams at Slack and Splunk. Adam was a postdoctoral scholar in the EECS Department at UC Berkeley, working in the AMP Lab, which specialized in cloud computing and Big Data. He earned a PhD in computer science from Stanford University and a MEng in EECS from MIT, where he also earned degrees in computer science and mathematics.
“I would kind of scoff at the like, ‘Oh, it's not what you know, it's who you know,’ because I was an academic. Of course it's what you know. That's the whole point.
Now of course I understand that it is in fact both. If you only have a network, then your only power is to inspire that network, but if you also have the knowledge and the skills and can activate a network of people by inspiring them to help come solve that problem with you, then I think you have the ingredients to really solve hard problems and build great companies.
I don't think either one is sufficient by itself, and that was not a perspective I had before.”
- Adam Oliner
SHOW NOTES:- Three questions to determine if this company will be successful and the origin story of Graft (2:25)
- How Graft identified the problem in AI/ML infrastructure for the 99% (6:58)
- When should you make introduction and customer discovery calls? (13:01)
- Co-founders, scaling, self-sufficient infrastructure and other lessons Adam learned from his first start-up (16:35)
- Clarifying questions for your product-building strategy and business plan (23:38)
- The biggest founder lessons from earning a PhD (25:34)
- Dissolving the barrier between ego and craft (30:18)
- Internal and external challenges from Adam’s founder experience (32:50)
- Activating your network (even if you’re “anti-networking”) (36:48)
- The importance of amplifying and praising your network (41:31)
- Why you should bias your products to be easy-to-use (43:36)
- Rapid fire questions (45:42)
- The Books of Earthsea - Ursula K. Le Guin’s critically acclaimed series of high fantasy novels about mages and sorcerers set in on a fictional group of islands called Earthsea.
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By The Engineering Leadership Community (ELC)In this episode, we explore the story of Adam Oliner, CEO & Founder @ Graft and discuss his perspectives on building business models, considerations around early business strategy, best practices for activating your network (if you’re anti-networking), and lessons from their recent pre-seed round & product-building bias toward ease of use! Plus, we dive into what it's like to be a founder with young kids, the impact of family on day-to-day operations and company values!
ABOUT ADAM OLINERAdam is the CEO & Founder at Graft, which aims to make the AI of the 1% accessible to the 99%. Before that, he led machine learning teams at Slack and Splunk. Adam was a postdoctoral scholar in the EECS Department at UC Berkeley, working in the AMP Lab, which specialized in cloud computing and Big Data. He earned a PhD in computer science from Stanford University and a MEng in EECS from MIT, where he also earned degrees in computer science and mathematics.
“I would kind of scoff at the like, ‘Oh, it's not what you know, it's who you know,’ because I was an academic. Of course it's what you know. That's the whole point.
Now of course I understand that it is in fact both. If you only have a network, then your only power is to inspire that network, but if you also have the knowledge and the skills and can activate a network of people by inspiring them to help come solve that problem with you, then I think you have the ingredients to really solve hard problems and build great companies.
I don't think either one is sufficient by itself, and that was not a perspective I had before.”
- Adam Oliner
SHOW NOTES:- Three questions to determine if this company will be successful and the origin story of Graft (2:25)
- How Graft identified the problem in AI/ML infrastructure for the 99% (6:58)
- When should you make introduction and customer discovery calls? (13:01)
- Co-founders, scaling, self-sufficient infrastructure and other lessons Adam learned from his first start-up (16:35)
- Clarifying questions for your product-building strategy and business plan (23:38)
- The biggest founder lessons from earning a PhD (25:34)
- Dissolving the barrier between ego and craft (30:18)
- Internal and external challenges from Adam’s founder experience (32:50)
- Activating your network (even if you’re “anti-networking”) (36:48)
- The importance of amplifying and praising your network (41:31)
- Why you should bias your products to be easy-to-use (43:36)
- Rapid fire questions (45:42)
- The Books of Earthsea - Ursula K. Le Guin’s critically acclaimed series of high fantasy novels about mages and sorcerers set in on a fictional group of islands called Earthsea.